US air travel should normalize by Sunday after ground stop triggers mass cancellations, FAA says
Airlines canceled thousands of flights across the U.S. on Saturday as they worked to recover from a nationwide ground stop a day earlier that left passengers scrambling for seats and disrupted travel around the world.
The U.S. air travel schedule should be back to normal by the end of Sunday, two days after what was the nation's longest ground stop in 25 years, Federal Aviation Administration Administrator Bryan Bedford told reporters in Washington on Saturday. He said airlines “will still have delays and cancellations” Saturday but promised that the “worst is behind us.”
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said the problem began when contractor L3Harris Technologies Inc. was replacing a section of the air traffic control system’s old copper wire with new fiber wire, somehow causing the system to overload. The work led to “intermittent” communications and radar gaps, prompting the government to shut down air traffic for more than four hours.
Duffy said officials were investigating whether contractor “incompetence” or a faulty router was the cause. “Our contractor didn't meet the moment or the equipment didn’t meet the moment,” he added.
L3Harris said it was supporting the FAA in its investigation to “understand the conditions” that led to the ground stop.
“L3Harris takes the nationwide ground stop and its impact on travelers, airlines and air traffic operations seriously,” it said in a statement.
The nationwide stop was the first since January 2023, when a key FAA computer system that sends notices to pilots malfunctioned, and the second since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
Andrew Charlton, an aviation consultant, said Friday's stoppage affected about a quarter of the 45,000 flights in the U.S. each day.
“The knock-on effect of that is incredible,” said Charlton, managing director of Aviation Advocacy. “The aircraft doesn’t just fly from A to B and back … and then stop. It then moves onto C and then over to E and around and around and around. It is, of course, exacerbated if you’re talking about long-haul flights, international flights over the Atlantic or over the Pacific.”
At airports across the U.S. on Saturday, passengers were still scrambling to figure out how to get to their destinations. Some waited out the chaos in hotels, others sprinted to snag rental cars and bus or train tickets. Many were forced to camp out in airports.
Others got creative. Video in Seattle's airport showed a passenger serenading stressed out travelers with classical music. Stranded strangers participated in a cornhole tournament at the Lexington, Kentucky, airport. The singer T-Pain and the band Hoobastank were captured on video singing to passengers as they waited on commercial airplanes.
Dan Russell, 66, learned his connecting flight from Kona, Hawaii, to Fresno, California, was canceled a half-hour before boarding was scheduled in San Diego on Friday night. Hotels were full, so he and his wife waited at the airport for a rebooked flight.
“There’s nothing you can do,” Russell said, as his wife, Mary, tried to nap on his shoulder.
A cheerful Southwest Airlines gate agent at Dallas Love Field greeted passengers at dawn with, “Good morning, good morning,” then repeatedly said all flights were full and asked passengers to have boarding passes ready to help keep flights moving.
In Las Vegas, Korean Mexican influencer Sujin Kim, known online as Chingu Amiga, said her flight to Mexico was rescheduled for Saturday morning. “Many people ended up sleeping at the airport, too, but thank God we managed to find a room,” she said.
At the Newark, N.J., airport, Umi Egchi was trying to figure out when his flights would line up so he could return home to Japan.
“I’m not sure exactly what happened. I just want to go home,” said Egchi, who had a sleep mask on top of his head.
Sports teams that traveled for games this weekend adjusted game start times, and No. 19 Mississippi’s game at Oklahoma was delayed a full day to Sunday.
FlightAware, a website that tracks flights, said more than 5,100 flights within, into or out of the U.S. had been canceled Saturday.
Duffy reiterated Saturday that no one was in danger as more than 3,000 flights in the air at the time of the grounding order landed safely.
Trump administration officials also blamed Congress for failing to approve more funding to replace the decades-old technology that helps manage the U.S. air traffic. Duffy said that 70% of the system had been replaced with fiber optic wire but that his agency also needs new air traffic control towers and runways.
The FAA has replaced thousands of old copper wires with fiber optic lines and upgraded hundreds of radio systems as part of an overhaul that began last year after Congress approved $12.5 billion in funding. Duffy and the White House are pushing for $30 billion more to complete the work.
“We have aging infrastructure throughout the airspace,” Duffy said, while stressing that flying remains safe. “You won’t get to your destination if we don’t think you can get there safely.”
In a moment that perhaps only further underscored the Transportation Department’s struggling systems, Duffy’s news conference Saturday morning began with audio troubles that forced last-minute microphone swaps.
Although Duffy said he had repeatedly spoken with President Donald Trump since the ground stop began, the president has largely been quiet on the topic. He has not spoken publicly on the matter, nor issued statements via social media, although he commented on other things. He spoke on the phone with a Fox News reporter, but that was not on camera.
Charlton, the aviation consultant, pointed to the difficulties of updating a system that can never shut down.
“What you’re watching here is trying to change the tires of your car when the car’s going at 80 miles an hour down the expressway, because nothing stops in aviation,” Charlton said.
The problem appeared similar to a regional air traffic control communication outage in September that snarled hundreds of flights across the Northeast. That disruption was linked to a construction crew cutting a fiber optic line.
Aging equipment was also blamed for brief radar outages last year that disrupted Newark airport.
Aviation safety expert Steve Arroyo said the difference Friday was the nationwide scale of the disruption, which left controllers unable to reliably talk to pilots.
“If you don’t have that ability, whether it’s because the old wires that they have are just run down or for whatever reason, you’ve got to stop airplanes on the ground and not put them in the air, where you’re going to risk not being able to communicate with them,” said Arroyo, a former United Airlines pilot.
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This version has been updated to correct that Duffy said investigators were looking at whether a possible faulty router, not a faulty wire, might have been the cause.
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Kruesi reported from Providence, Rhode Island. Associated Press journalists Jill Colvin in New York, Seung Min Kim in Washington, Josh Funk in Omaha, Nebraska, Elliot Spagat in San Diego, Bernice Bautista in Las Vegas, Marc Levy in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania and Hannah Fingerhut in Des Moines, Iowa, also contributed.
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